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development in Islamic scholarship

...need to verify Hadith stimulated a characteristic form of premodern Muslim intellectual and literary activity, the collecting of biographical materials into compendiums (
ṭabaqāt). By viewing the Qurʾān and documentable Sunnah as preeminent, al-Shāfiʿī also undermined those in ʿAbbāsid court circles who...

importance in Arabic literary criticism

...of value. The earliest texts of literary criticism in Arabic thus involve the process of “ranking” poets, that being part of a larger process of establishing
ṭabaqāt (“classes,” or “levels”). Two such early works belong to al-Aṣmaʿī and his student Ibn Sallām...